From the announcement, it saddens them too:
> As a personal note, I do not like this decision. To me LFS is about learning how a system works. Understanding the boot process is a big part of that. systemd is about 1678 "C" files plus many data files. System V is "22" C files plus about 50 short bash scripts and data files.
However the reasoning they provide makes sense.. It's hard to build a Linux system with a desktop these days without Sysd.
> It's hard to build a Linux system with a desktop these days without Sysd.
Most Gentoo Linux desktop users disagree. In fact, OpenRC is the default in that distro.
Having said that, I do expect that Gentoo has more manpower available than LFS.
Maybe they're KDE users. I was under the impression that gnome requires it. FTA it sounds like KDE will soon too. Gentoo doesn't come with a desktop by default either, you have to emerge it, which might install systemd..
FTA: "The second reason for dropping System V is that packages like GNOME and soon KDE's Plasma are building in requirements that require capabilities in systemd"
> I was under the impression that gnome requires it.
It doesn't seem to require it at this moment. I have "-systemd" in my USE flags, and have neither sys-apps/systemd nor gnome-base/gnome currently installed. After enabling several USE flags that have nothing to do with systemd [0], emerge was quite happy to offer to install gnome-base/gnome and its dependencies, and absolutely did not offer to install systemd.
Honestly, I don't even know if GNOME has a hard dependency on Wayland... I see many of the dependent packages in the 'gnome-*' categories have an "X" USE flag. I CBA to investigate, though.
Is KDE Plasma building in hard systemd requirements, or is it just building in hard Wayland requirements? I'd known about the latter [1] and -because I'd thought it was important to the KDE folks that KDE runs on BSD- would be surprised if they irreversibly tethered themselves to systemd.
[0] introspection pulseaudio vala server screencast wayland theora eds egl gles2
[1] Though do note that the same blog post that announced the change in policy for Plasma also announced that no other KDE software was going to have a hard dependency on Wayland for the foreseeable future.
Is it? What's the connection between systemd and having a desktop?
Read the article: "The second reason for dropping System V is that packages like GNOME and soon KDE's Plasma are building in requirements that require capabilities in systemd"
If GNOME and KDE were the only desktop solutions, your ''Read the article'' comment would be sensible.